The number of German settlers and farmers trebled to a peak population of 15,000 in 1913. Windhoek was now a bustling new town boasting eight hotels and numerous bars and Bierkellers. It also had a grand new bronze statue, The Rider, built under the walls of the fortress, on the site of the concentration camp where only a few years earlier 4,000 Herero had been starved and worked to death. A perfect metaphor for the campaign of ‘organised forgetting’ that the German colony now embarked upon.
Postscript
The Desk Killers of Windhoek: Dr Dove, Dr Rohrbach and Dr Fischer
Although guns and concentration camps and forced labour, and military commanders like General von Trotha, were all critical factors in the genocide that took place in South-West Africa in the 1890s and 1900s, it is also important to recognise the role played by a small but lethal army of academics and colonial officials and intellectuals, most of who have now faded out of our historical vision – men whose hands would never operate a Maxim gun, yet they wrote the words, and compiled the reports, which enabled an extraordinary level of violence to be unleashed. Three ‘desk men’ in particular played key roles in creating the climate for genocide in South-West Africa – Dr Karl Dove, a geographer and climatologist, Dr Paul Rohrbach, a colonial advisor on economic development, and Dr Eugen Fischer, an anthropologist.
Dove gained his doctorate in 1888 with a thesis titled ‘The Climate of Extratropical South Africa’, later published as a book that became the standard text on the climate and the agricultural potential of southern Africa, a bible for future farmers and settlers. He was also a board member of the German Colonial Society, which funded the eighteen months he spent in South-West Africa in 1892–3, as ‘Director of Land Settlement’, coinciding exactly with François’ establishment of Windhoek as the fortress-capital of the colony and the first wave of settlers moving from Germany to South-West Africa to farm and trade. Dove published four papers subsequently detailing which parts of the colony would be most suitable for crop cultivation, and also mineral analysis of different areas, showing the mining potential of the new colony.
Back in Germany, he berated Leutwein for his ‘lenient’ treatment of the Nama, writing to a German newspaper that he hoped ‘that the Imperial Governor will not be prevented by the sentimental humanitarianism of certain quarters from sending all the [Nama] falling into his hands to the gallows … There is no place for sickly sentimentalism!’ He later became professor of geography at the University of Jena, and then at Freiburg; he continued to publish many books on the economic geography of the German colonies (1902), German South-West Africa (1903), and a four-volume work on German Colonies (1909–13). But he is probably best known not for any of these academic writings but his views that violence towards native Africans was almost a moral duty – they could not be compared to Europeans in any way: ‘As to the ideas of their sense of justice, these are based on false premises. It is incorrect to view justice, in regard to the natives, as if they were of the same kultur-position as ourselves.’ He summed up his philosophy of supremacism like this: ‘Leniency towards the natives is cruelty to the whites’ – a sentiment which prefigured Hitler’s chilling remark to his generals on 26 May 1944, justifying his Ausrottung – the rooting out, the extermination, of the Jews in Hungary: ‘Kindness here, as indeed anywhere else, would be just about the greatest cruelty to our own people.’fn12
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Former missionary Dr Paul Rohrbach was appointed as settlement commissioner to South-West Africa (the role Karl Dove had played a decade earlier) in 1903. He was specifically tasked to analyse the potential of the colony for large-scale settlement and farming, and to see what lessons could be learnt from the British colonisation of South Africa, particularly the methods by which they took over land from the indigenous peoples. Rohrbach was given a significant budget by the Colonial Office in Berlin (300,000 marks per year), and was effectively the second-most powerful official in the colony after Governor Leutwein. He had been selected because of his wide experience of colonial outposts, but also because of his ultra-nationalist views – he was a fanatical believer in Social Darwinism and the recently published work of Ratzel on the need for Germany to expand its Lebensraum.
When he took up his posting he believed that the native population of South-West Africa could be exploited by being used as an economic resource, but very quickly his views evolved in a far more radical direction. Any missionary zeal he may have taken from his experience in China and Asia, about paternalistically improving the lives of the natives and spreading the Gospel, was soon replaced by an obsessive focus on the supremacy of the white race – again prefiguring, strikingly so, the language which Hitler and Himmler were to use forty years later:
No false philanthropy or racial theory can prove to reasonable people that the preservation of any tribe of nomadic South African Kaffirs … is more important for the future of mankind than the expansion of the great European nations, or the white race as a whole. Not until the native learns to produce anything of value in the service of the higher race, i.e. in the service of its and his own progress, does he gain any moral right to exist.
Such logic made the displacement of the indigenous people inevitable. He wrote later that ‘The decision to colonise in South-West Africa could mean nothing else but this, namely that the native tribes would have to give up their lands on which they have previously grazed their stock in order that the white man might have the land for the grazing of his stock.’ And the only role left to the indigenous Africans would be to facilitate this transition, and behave with ‘the greatest possible working efficency’ as slaves to the colonists.
Rohrbach was working in Windheok throughout 1904–5, during von Trotha’s genocidal reign, providing a continuous background justification for the slaughter that was going on at the time – historians have understandably focussed most of their attention on what von Trotha did in the Omaheke, but I wonder if Rohrbach’s role, essentially providing the moral support for these actions among the settlers and colonists, has ever been fully recognised. In 1907, a year after he left his position in Windhoek and returned to Germany, he published Deutsche Kolonialwirtschaft (‘German Colonial Economy’), which can be seen as a response to the growing controversy in Germany regarding reports from South-West Africa at this time. Just before Christmas 1906, rumours of the conditions at Shark Island, based on missionary reports, began to reach Berlin. A Reichstag social democrat deputy raised the issue formally in December, and the subsequent controversy led to the colonial budget being voted down, and the German government having to face re-election in 1907 – what became known as ‘the Hottentot Election’. Rohrbach’s contribution to the bitter debate that was going on in Germany was to publish his book, which included this explicit justification for what von Trotha had just done in South-West Africa: ‘In order to secure the peaceful White settlement against the bad, culturally inept and predatory native tribe, it is possible that actual eradication may become necessary under certain conditions.’
Rohrbach later took up a senior position at the Berlin School of Commerce, and published two even more influential books – Der deutsche Gedanke in die Welt (‘German World Policies’) in 1912, and Der Kreig und die deutsche Politik (‘The War and German Politics’) in 1914. These works built on his earlier themes – the need for wholesale displacement, and even extermination of native peoples, which he’d originally advocated in an African context, but now he began to see a greater scope and audience for his extreme nationalism.